Posted by: Contributing columnist, CLARION LEDGER FEATURE, BUSINESS, September 2, 2015: The most fundamental and oldest of the technology predictions is Moore’s Law, which is universally credited as the driving force behind the digital revolution over the past 30-40 years. Moore’s Law, which is now 50 years old, is still going strong despite the fact that its demise has been predicted dozens of times.
If you’re not familiar with Moore’s Law, in April 1965, Gordon Moore, was asked by Electronics Magazine to predict what the next 10 years held for the semiconductor component industry. Moore, who later went on to found Intel, made the prediction that “the number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18 months” and predicted it would do the same for the next 10 years. By the time people started to really notice Moore’s Law, in the mid-1970s, that prediction had morphed and simplified into, “computing power doubles every two years, with the price going down by half.”
Nothing has so fundamentally changed our world in such a short period of time as the digital transformation we’ve seen over the last 50 years, and Moore’s Law provided an order to that transformation that both provided insight into the phenomenon as it happened and focused expectations toward its continuation.
More importantly than the law, however, has been the technology, products and changes we’ve seen in our lives through the digital revolution since that time. Interestingly, in Moore’s 1965 article, the original of which can be found on the internet, he predicted everything from home computers to the internet. He stated, “Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers … automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment … [They] will also switch telephone circuits and perform data processing.”
There are physical limitations, though, to the exact implementation of Moore’s Law, and those limitations and others have led dozens of people to predict that it is — or soon will be — dead. Because we can now interconnect and combine processing essentially into single computers, the essence of Moore’s Law — doubling of computing power and halving of price every two years — has lived on.
In this context, I started to wonder what Moore thinks now, having seen his predictions continue and mature. Fortunately for us, there is a great interview with the now 86-year-old Gordon Moore by Thomas L. Friedman from this past May on YouTube, and I encourage you to watch it.
If you think about it, topics I’ve discussed in previous articles such as the Internet of Things, big data and crowd sourcing would not be possible without Moore’s Law and the continued growth of computing power and related decline of cost. It’s the reason why our smartphones have a lot more computing power than the first space shuttle did as well as the reason why our homes, cars and even watches will continue to have more computing power and be less expensive in the future.
While history has generally captured our progress fairly well over the last thousand years, I do think it’s rare that we can understand the transformations we see happening in the world around us at the time that they are happening. It’s even rarer when someone can identify a trend in its very infancy, which is why it’s important to honor both Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law as it turns 50.
As should be expected, knowing the future is also profitable and his insights and the accuracy of his predictions have allowed Gordon Moore to today be worth an estimated $6.5 billion. Of course as Moore’s Law turns 50, our lives are much richer because of the improvements we’ve seen and will no doubt continue to improve as Moore’s law continues to change the world.
Tony Jeff is the president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. He can be reached at tjeff@innovate.ms.